The Women Come and Go

The love song of T. S. Eliot.

T. S. Eliot's sex life. Do we really want to go there? It is a sad and desolate place. Eliot was twenty-six and, almost certainly, a frustrated virgin when, in 1915, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman he had known for three months. Haigh-Wood was a medically and emotionally vexed person. Her troubles included irregular and frequent menstruation, migraines, neuralgia, panic attacks, and, eventually, addiction to her medication, particularly to ether. She was pretty, ambitious, and (on her better days) vivacious. Eliot was handsome, ambitious, and the opposite of vivacious. "Exquisite and listless," Bertrand Russell described him when he met the Eliots for dinner two weeks after the marriage. "She says she married him in order to stimulate him, but finds she can't do it. Obviously he married in order to be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him."

Russell was correct to intuit a tension. The Eliots seem to have discovered that they were sexually incompatible almost immediately. Mrs. Eliot reacted by having an affair with Russell, which her husband either tacitly condoned or was remarkably obtuse about. (Russell was a sexual predator who permitted himself to become temporarily infatuated with the women he seduced. He pretended, by way of self-justification, to believe that his intimacy with Vivienne provided a form of marital therapy to the Eliots.)

Eliot's own medical and emotional condition was not exactly robust, and he was quickly worn down by the demands of caring for Vivienne. He was also a man whose sense of propriety was sometimes indistinguishable from squeamishness. He told his friends the Woolfs that he could not imagine shaving in his wife's presence. He and Vivienne slept in separate rooms. She baited him in front of guests; he often responded by declining to respond; and (although it is impossible to be sure) they seem to have been, for much of their marriage, sexually estranged. It was in Eliot's character to convert misfortune into fate, and he eventually undertook to normalize the abnormality. In 1927, he was confirmed into the Church of England, which made divorce essentially impossible; in 1928, he took a vow of chastity.

Four years later, Eliot went to the United States to teach and lecture, leaving Vivienne in England. While he was away, he had his solicitors send her a letter announcing his intention to separate, and when he returned, after a year, he went into hiding. If he imagined that a clean break would help Vivienne get over him faster, he miscalculated badly. The separation unhinged her. She stalked her husband, now a famous man, for five years. She was never able to find out where he lived, and he used to slip out the back of the office at Faber & Faber, where he was an editor, whenever she showed up asking for him. (The receptionist was on instructions to give him a special ring.) Most of the friends Vivienne had made through her marriage abandoned her, and her behavior grew increasingly bizarre. In 1934, she joined the British Union of Fascists; she liked to wear the uniform in public. In 1938, her brother, Maurice, had her committed to an asylum. She died there in 1947, at the age of fifty-eight, possibly from a deliberate overdose.

Eliot had meanwhile renewed his acquaintance with an American woman named Emily Hale, whom he had been in love with when he was a student at Harvard. At the time, she had declined to reciprocate his affections; now, an unmarried drama teacher at Scripps College, she found that her reasons for indifference had become less pressing. She devoted herself to Eliot. During the nineteen-thirties, she frequently spent the summer in England with him. Their relations were platonic. Hale was a proper Boston lady; Eliot's Bloomsbury friends found her hideously dull. "That awful American woman Miss Hale," Ottoline Morrell complained. "She is like a sergeant major, quite intolerable. However Tom takes her about everywhere." Hale plainly believed that she was first in line to become the next Mrs. Eliot. But when Vivienne died Eliot told Hale that although he loved her, it was not, as she reported to a friend, "in the way usual to men less gifted i.e. with complete love thro' a married relationship." Hale was fifty-five. She decided to settle for incomplete love through an unmarried relationship.

Eliot had acquired another admirer, an Englishwoman named Mary Trevelyan. Their relationship, too, was asexual; apparently to discourage illusions of intimacy, Eliot made it a rule that they could not dine together on consecutive nights. They were friends for twenty years, during which Trevelyan proposed three times. Eliot demurred: after Vivienne, he explained, the idea of living with someone was a "nightmare." Then, in 1957, at the age of sixty-eight, and without notifying Hale or Trevelyan, Eliot married his thirty-year-old secretary, Valerie Fletcher. Eliot and Mary Trevelyan stopped speaking to one another; Emily Hale had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Massachusetts General Hospital. Eliot was happy in his second marriage, which seems to have been a case of complete love of the married type. ("There was nothing wrong with Tom, if that's your implication," Valerie Eliot once told an interviewer who asked why Eliot's first marriage had been a failure.) Eliot died in 1965; Valerie Eliot is still alive. She is her husband's literary executor and, thanks to "Cats," a very wealthy woman.

This may seem a limited range of sexual experience for a poet much of whose work is preoccupied with sex and sexuality. But E. M. Forster had published three novels before he had any clear idea of what the sex act consisted in, and Henry James, as far as we know, never had a sexual relationship (of the "complete" type, anyway) with anyone. Sexual experience has no necessary correlation with sexual imagination, and neglect of this basic distinction is the second most exasperating thing about Carole Seymour-Jones's "Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius" (Doubleday; $35). Seymour-Jones insists on reading Eliot's poetry as a literal report on his personal tastes and experiences. Eliot invented characters who were sexually passive (J. Alfred Prufrock), sexually predatory (Mr. Apollinax, a character modelled on Russell), sexually mercenary (the young man carbuncular, in "The Waste Land"), sexually louche (Mr. Silvero, of the caressing hands, in "Gerontion"), sexually violent (Sweeney), and sexually indiscriminate (Columbo, in the series of privately circulated ribald verses, of a socially unredeeming explicitness that would almost make a rapper blush, entitled "King Bolo and His Big Black Kween"). The sex in Eliot's poetry is almost always bad sex, either libidinally limp or morally vicious. But that's because for Eliot bad sex was the symptom of a failure of civilization, and it is a fallacy to conclude that, because sex in his poems is disgusting, Eliot was disgusted by sex. Eliot was disgusted by modern life, period. That he found a way to express that disgust through lurid sexual characterization was one of the reasons his poetry seemed, in its time, so compelling.

"Painted Shadow" draws on Vivienne Eliot's papers, which she left to the Bodleian Library, at Oxford. Copyright on that material is claimed by Valerie Eliot, but Seymour-Jones was given permission to quote from it without restriction, and her book is filled with fresh details. Although her sympathies lie entirely with Vivienne, she clears Eliot of most of the nastier insinuations of Michael Hastings's play "Tom and Viv," which was first performed in 1984, and made into a movie, with Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson, ten years later. Hastings got his information about the marriage largely from an interview with Maurice Haigh-Wood, in 1980, when Haigh-Wood, with his sister and his distinguished brother-in-law no longer around, felt that it was safe to cast events in a light favorable to himself. Haigh-Wood was not deliberately deceitful; he just felt guilty about what had happened to his sister, and he implied that he and Eliot had plotted to get her out of the way by having her involuntarily committed. Seymour-Jones makes it clear that Eliot had nothing to do with Vivienne's committal—Maurice arranged it—and that, whether or not Vivienne was clinically insane, she had become, by 1938, a danger to herself. The police found her wandering the streets of London at five in the morning; when Maurice arrived to get her, she asked him if it was true that Eliot had been beheaded.

Still, "Painted Shadow" does not really challenge the standard view of Vivienne Eliot as an unhappy woman who made Eliot unhappy but gave him (as Yeats said of the spirits) metaphors for poetry. Contrary to the book's subtitle, the truth of Vivienne Eliot's influence on her husband's genius has not been long suppressed, because, apart from the emotional agitation, which is acknowledged by nearly every commentator and by Eliot himself, her influence was not especially notable. Vivienne read Eliot's drafts; she contributed, under pseudonyms, satirical poems, stories, and reviews to the journal he edited, The Criterion, whose name she had supplied; and she believed in his genius. Eliot admired her writing and valued her advice. He sometimes adapted lines she had written for his own poems. (He also adapted lines from Dante, Shakespeare, and dozens of other writers.) He was proud of her literary abilities, and although he complained interminably about their health and their finances, he does not seem to have criticized her to their friends or to his family.

But why did he marry her? Why, after their incompatibility had become obvious, did he stay with her for eighteen years? And why, after her death, did he wait ten years before marrying again? Seymour-Jones has a theory. She believes that Eliot was gay, and that he led a "secret life." He married Vivienne (according to this theory) in a desperate attempt to "normalize" himself, and he stayed married partly out of fear that, knowing the truth about his sexuality, she would expose him and cause a scandal. He separated from her in order to pursue relationships with men; he used Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan as beards; and in old age, suffering from emphysema, he married, in effect, a nurse. And this brings us to the first most exasperating thing about Seymour-Jones's book, which is not her theory but her complete inability to prove it.

It is certainly possible that Eliot had homosexual feelings. He might have had exclusively homosexual feelings (which is what Seymour-Jones apparently believes); he might have had bisexual feelings; he might have had homosexual feelings that he repressed, or that he felt ashamed of or guilty about. He might have had homoerotic encounters, and he might even have had homosexual experiences (which Seymour-Jones has convinced herself he did). The trouble is that the evidence available to establish any of these things is hopelessly inconclusive.

The claim that homosexuality is the "key" to understanding Eliot is not new, but before "Painted Shadow" (and apart from some speculative remarks, of the raised-eyebrow variety, in a few memoirs) the argument was made almost entirely from the poetry. In 1952, a young Canadian professor, John Peter, published an article in the academic journal Essays in Criticism in which he interpreted "The Waste Land" as an elegy for a dead male beloved. (Among other evidence, Peter claimed to have found allusions to sodomy in the poem.) In 1952, imaginative interpretations of "The Waste Land" were already a dime a dozen. But, when Peter's essay came to Eliot's attention, Eliot had his solicitors send the journal a letter in which they reported their client's "amazement and disgust," and strongly implied that he would sue for libel if the article continued to be disseminated. Peter, much abashed, sent Eliot an apology, and the article was purged from a later printing of that number of Essays in Criticism. In 1969, though, four years after Eliot's death, Peter reprinted it, in the same journal, and added a postscript in which he identified the beloved as a young man Eliot had known in Paris, Jean Verdenal. And in 1977 James E. Miller, Jr., encouraged by Peter's article, published a book-length interpretation, "T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land," devoted to what would now be called "queering" the poem. It was an energetic and somewhat carefree performance. Miller explained the speech of the hyacinth girl, for example—" 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / They called me the hyacinth girl' "—by suggesting that the lines are spoken by a man, and should be read with a kind of cross-dressed suggestiveness: " 'They called me the hyacinth girl!' "

It might seem that Eliot's reaction to Peter's original article betrays him, but Eliot had threatened before to sue a publication that had printed information about his private life. He was a buttoned-up man (to put it mildly), and he didn't enjoy seeing personal things written about him any more than anyone else does. His suppression of Peter's article doesn't mean that Peter was wrong, but it doesn't mean that Peter was right, either. One imagines that, in the case at hand, the annoyance of a secretly gay man and the annoyance of a homophobe would be about the same.

Like Peter and Miller, Seymour-Jones attaches a lot of significance to Jean Verdenal. This is understandable, since there is no other plausible known candidate for a male love-object in Eliot's biography. Verdenal was a French medical student whom Eliot met in Paris, where he was spending a year on his own, in 1910. They boarded at the same pension, and became companions. That year in Paris was inspirational for Eliot: he got interested in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which was an influence on many of his early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," finished in 1911; and he was introduced to the reactionary cultural and political ideas of the Action Française, which influenced both his poetry and his social criticism. He romanticized the year, and Verdenal was part of the memory.

One reason Verdenal acquired this importance, though, was that after that year he and Eliot never saw each other again. They exchanged some letters, and then Verdenal enlisted in the Army as a medical officer. He was killed, in 1915, at Gallipoli. When Eliot published his first book of poems, "Prufrock and Other Observations," in 1917, he dedicated it to Verdenal, "mort aux Dardanelles." Eliot seems to have believed that Verdenal drowned (he did not), and this has given support to the identification of the drowned sailor Phlebas the Phoenician, in "The Waste Land" ("Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you"), with Verdenal.

It is fair to assume that Eliot felt a close attachment to Verdenal, and that he mourned his death. Eliot's letters to Verdenal are lost, but we have Verdenal's to Eliot (or some of them; it is possible, of course, that Eliot destroyed others), and there is nothing in them to suggest an unusual intimacy. They show Verdenal to be, like Eliot at that age, a high-minded, philosophical young man with an enthusiasm for French poetry and for Wagner. It is possible that, in Eliot's mind, he represented a love that dared not declare itself; but it is certain that he represented the flower of the European civilization that the First World War destroyed. And that is why it is legitimate to imagine him as the real-life figure behind Phlebas in "The Waste Land." Whatever personal demons drove Eliot to compose it, "The Waste Land" is a poem about the war, just as "Women in Love" and "To the Lighthouse" and "In Our Time" are books about the war and the way of life the war put an end to.

Seymour-Jones places Eliot in the company of a number of homosexual men at various points in his life, but Eliot associated as a matter of course with writers and artists who were homosexual or bisexual: Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Serge Diaghilev, Osbert Sitwell, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Geoffrey Faber, W. H. Auden. Homosexuality was just part of the world he worked in, which makes it even harder to understand why, if he did have affairs with men, he went to such pains to remain closeted. In 1933, searching for a place to hide from Vivienne, Eliot spent a short time living in a flat with three gay men. Seymour-Jones suggests that he went cruising at night, but the evidence for this is a remark, many years later, by one of the flatmates: "Well, he would hardly have spent that period living with us if he had not had some leanings, now would he?" This seems rather thin corroboration.

Sometime in 1934, Eliot left the flat and went to live in Kensington in a rectory run by a Father Eric Cheetham. Seymour-Jones says, "Tom and Eric Cheetham lived together for six years." This is a little misleading. Eliot paid rent on his rooms at the rectory, and, while Cheetham ate with the other priests who lived there, Eliot usually went out for dinner. Beginning in 1937, Eliot and Cheetham did share a flat near the rectory, but in 1940 Eliot left and moved in with a family outside London. After the war, he lived, until his marriage to Valerie, with John Hayward, a single man who was confined to a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy, and who was pleased to describe himself as "the most un-homosexual man in London." Much of Eliot's correspondence remains unpublished; some of it—including a thousand letters to Emily Hale—is still sequestered. But Seymour-Jones has not found anything pointing unambiguously to a homosexual relationship in Eliot's life, and we can feel confident that she has conducted a thorough search.

"She has an original mind," Eliot once wrote to a friend about Vivienne, "and I consider not at all a feminine one." Like other recent commentators on Eliot's writing, Seymour-Jones is quite right to identify a misogynistic tendency. Eliot's attitude toward women had the same source as his attitude toward Jews: the reactionary program of the Action Française (which had also attracted the interest of Jean Verdenal). The Action Française was, originally, an anti-Dreyfusard political movement; its leader, Charles Maurras, ascribed what he regarded as the decline of France to the influence of women and Jews, whom he held responsible for the corruptions of individualism, romanticism, sensuality, and irrationalism. Eliot was a serious admirer of Maurras's book "L'Avenir de l'Intelligence," which he read during his year in Paris, and, later on, of Julien Benda's tract "Belphégor," which was published in 1918, and which attributes the decay of French culture to (ahead of other undesirables) women writers and Jewish philosophers. This is why the alleged un-femininity of his wife's mind was, for Eliot, a point of pride.

In the poetry, this attitude toward the female mind is expressed as a horror of female sexuality. The poetry Eliot wrote between 1918 and 1922 is populated by oversexed female characters: Grishkin ("The sleek Brazilian jaguar / Does not in its arboreal gloom / Distil so rank a feline smell / As Grishkin in a drawing-room"); Princess Volupine (who "extends / A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand / To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, / She entertains Sir Ferdinand / Klein"); the Jewish prostitute Rachel née Rabinovitch (who "tears at the grapes with murderous paws"); the sexually negligent typist ("Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over' "); and the vampirish woman who "drew her long black hair out tight," in "The Waste Land." It is tempting (and Seymour-Jones, naturally, succumbs to the temptation) to derive these figures from Vivienne. But Eliot's conception of women as civilization's succubae predated his marriage.

Possibly sex is the wrong frame for understanding that marriage anyway. Tom and Vivienne had a life together, after all. They went dancing and listened to music, and they shared an interest in contemporary art and literature. Eliot thought that Vivienne had rescued him from a boring life as an American philosophy professor, which is what his family wanted for him. He realized very quickly that he had married an invalid, and for many years he was committed to her care. He nursed Vivienne, he searched out special treatments for her, and he fretted continually, and somewhat neurotically, about providing financially for her. She nursed him, too. In the end, he was overmatched: he didn't have the temperament—he was too absorbed by the fascinations of his own depression and self-loathing—to sustain the necessary devotion.

And devotion, not merely sexual satisfaction, was what Vivienne desired. Eliot's desertion shattered her, because, despite her craziness and her taunting, she worshipped him. She used to leave her front door unlocked every night between ten-thirty and eleven, in case he decided to return. Her stalking was not aggressive; it was pathetic. She imagined that her husband had been taken away by people who didn't care for him and would destroy him. She did not mean to be a harpy, and he did not mean to be a brute. Those were just the forms their unhappiness had to take.

In 1935, Vivienne managed to track her husband down at a book fair, where she had learned that he was scheduled to give a talk. She wore her Fascist uniform and carried, in her arms, three of Eliot's books and their terrier, Polly. As the audience was getting seated, she turned and saw that Eliot was right behind her, on his way to the lectern. She recorded the moment in her diary:

**{: .break one} ** I turned a face to him of such joy that no-one in that great crowd could have had one moment's doubt. I just said, Oh Tom, & he seized my hand, & said how do you do, in quite a loud voice. He walked straight on to the platform then & gave a most remarkably clever, well thought out lecture. . . . I stood the whole time, holding Polly up high in my arms. Polly was very excited & wild. I kept my eyes on Tom's face the whole time, & I kept nodding my head at him, & making encouraging signs. He looked a little older, more mature & smart, much thinner & not well or robust or rumbustious at all. No sign of a woman's care about him. No cosy evenings with dogs and gramophones I should say. **

After the lecture, she went onstage and stood next to him while he signed copies of his books. "I said quietly, Will you come back with me?" "I cannot talk to you now," Eliot replied. He signed the books she had brought with her, and then he left. She never saw him again. ♦

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